Cantos of a Capsized Canoe

With lyrical precision and unflinching candour, Cantos probes the complexities of life in the creeks and the broad questions of identity, culture, social justice and resistance in the search for meaning… Indeed, the poems are a testament to the power of language to transcend borders and boundaries, speaking truths that are both intimate and expansive. The rhythms and cadences that adorn the lines, in their percussive beat, echo both the cultural heritage of the poet’s Niger-Delta roots and the complexities of contemporary life… Yeibo once again sets a new benchmark in African poetic imagination that speaks to the triumph of the human spirit, one that also testifies to the resilience and creativity of the human heart. It is a collection that further cements Yeibo’s place as a major voice in contemporary poetry. –Dr Abba Abba, DAADS (Humboldi), AHPf (Dar es Salaam), BAf (Reading), Winner NENG Prize for Literary Criticism 2022)

Cantos of a Capsized Canoe is yet another of Ebi Yeibo’s imagist poetic renditions of the plight of the Niger Delta environment as both a haven of cultural bliss and a hovel of despoliation. After an almost lifelong strident poetic fidelity to the cause of environmental justice in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria in volume after volume of poetry, the master poet takes a break here to juggle, in deft lines, the beauties in the rubble of his beloved flora and fauna.– Denja Abdullahi, JANA, NPOM, Poet, playwright & former president, Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA)

Like White Masks (2019), Ebi Yeibo’s Cantos of a Capsized Canoe further strengthens his poetic excellence and adds a more mature, more politically engaged thematic layer to his poctic subjects. The idea of a widening poetic concern occasioned by stylistic and artistic maturation looms large in the poet’s most recent collections…As is the hallmark of his bourgeoning oeuvre, Cantos of a Capsized Canoe is conceived and rendered effortlessly in that distinct but unmistakable idiom that derives its poetic denouement from the flow and tempo of the Izon of the Niger Delta. Again, like his previous collections of poems, the poet’s deployment of oral resources in the symbolic process of the poems in the collection confers harmony and symmetry on the book – ISMAIL BALA, Poet And Fellow; International Writers Program, lowa, USA.